The horns of the Moose are very characteristic, being of immense size and palmated before and behind so that an average full-grown pair weighs seventy pounds and shows a spread of forty-six inches between the points of the posterior branch as against a length of thirty-eight inches. Our illustration is a photograph of one with horns of remarkable size, measuring about seventy-one inches from tip to tip in a line across the head. It is not until the third year that the horns are palmated, and they increase in size from year to year. In the winter the old horns are cast, but they sprout again in the spring, and by June have shed their velvet and appear a beautiful white. Although so large and characteristic, it is not known that they serve any more useful purpose than as weapons during the rutting season. In running through the woods the Moose throws his head back, and, despite the spread and weight of his horns, he is able to move about without breaking a twig. The clumsy shape of the head is accentuated by the hump on the nose, which is due to the excessive development of the nasal septum and of the upper lip, which is long and supple, and adapted to browsing rather than to cropping grass. The short neck of the Moose would in any case interfere with the cropping of grass, even if it were found in the snowy inlands of Alaska. Its common food is the twigs and bark of willows and birches, which it rides down to reach the tops, lichens and mosses and the aquatic plants of summer. In winter the Moose herd together in the snow, forming great tramped-down places called moose yards by hunters. In summer comes the rutting season, in which the great males shake their antlers and attack any animal that comes their way. With summer comes mosquitoes also, and these pester the Moose to such an extent that they are galled to a greater fury. So it is that the Moose is a most dangerous animal in the time when the ground is clear, the swamps full of mosquitoes and his horns new-stripped of velvet for the fray. When the snow lies so deep that he cannot travel even with his long legs, the enemies of the Moose have him at a disadvantage, and often the yards are attacked by wolves or bears or, worse yet, by agile men on snowshoes. Killing in the snow is not recognized as legitimate sport, and is resorted to only by skin hunters or men lacking in the higher ideals of sportsmen. The ordinary method of hunting deer in the summer is by imitating the rutting cry of the male, the reply of the cow and the defiant challenge of the male again, followed by the thrashing and scraping of the trees and branches where the hunter lies concealed. These cries are produced by blowing through a birchbark horn, and on account of the blind fury of the rutting males they are often very successful in bringing them to their death. [Illustration: ALASKAN MOOSE. (Alces gigas).]